.ear deployment problems

[tivons]

Is there something else you have to do to properly deploy a Cold Fusion .ear file created from the Cold Fusion Administration archive section (V8 Enterprise Edition)? I deployed my .ear file to an Oracle 10g application server with no reported errors. The server manager says the application is started but when I hit the server context I get the following message:

500 Internal Server Error
Servlet error: An exception occurred. The current application deployment descriptors do not allow for including it in this response. Please consult the application log for details.

The application is a single cold fusion page that renders the text 'Hello World'.

I get the same message if I try to bring up the cold fusion administrator which I enabled when I created the .ear.

If anyone has successfully deplolyed an application using the .ear archive, I would appreciate your comments.

[tivons · Accepted solution]

We figured out how to do it.
First, you have to install your Cold Fusion developer's edition as the multi-server option. This causes it to run under jRun and means your source code has to go under the server root. The default is
jrun4\servers\cfusion\cfusion-ear\cfusion-war\

There is no change to the .ear file creation process. However, when you deploy that .ear to Oracle AS 10g you now end up with 10 pages of loaded servlets and your application actually runs from the context root just like a real java application.

Notes:
java is really case sensitive and not forgiving like cold fusion. Keep your file names in lower case or something that runs under a 'regular' cold fusion server will not run on Oracle.

If you have an index.cfm module in your root that just runs when you hit the application, you will need to remember to include the entire file name when you move your application to Oracle. The java application server does not know from .cfm files so you will have to tell it where to go.

We found that we could create one good .ear file for a given application per system reboot. After that the .ear files were incomplete and would not deploy. Sometimes just bouncing the cold fusion application server on jrun cured this but not always.

In our test environment, the oracle application server did not know how to process the .xls or .doc mime types. You can tell it what to do in the web.xml but there are many web.xml files in the oracle server directories. We found that if you added the <mime-mapping> section to the web.xml file located on the jrun server under
jrun4\servers\cfusion\cfusion-ear\cfusion-war\WEB-INF , it will get passed to the web.xml file in your .ear files.

We heard from our Cold Fusion reseller that the .ear from the developer's edition was not a 'real' .ear. We found that this was not the case for us.

Remember if you are going to deploy to a customer or to production, you have to enter a valid enterpirse server license key when you create the .ear.

Also these .ear's are really big, they contain the entire cold fusion application server as well as your application.